Romantic periodicals and the recovery of personal history

In recent years, there has been an uptick in scholarship at the intersection of TS and periodical studies, even if the methodological and theoretical implications of their combination remain relatively underexplored. Periodical TS hold particular interest for translation history, in that periodicals offer an unparalleled archive of information regarding cultural exchanges, flows and transfers on and between transnational, national and regional levels. A dominant strategy has been to read periodicals in furtherance of a “social history of knowledge” (Burke 2012) by formalising complex interactions through large-scale approaches enhanced by digital methods. Historical approaches, however, also demonstrate the importance of supplementing and complicating such universalising approaches with readings at the micro-historical level. The privileging of smaller-scale, personalised histories modelled by translator studies may prove useful in this regard. This paper contends that histories of the Romantic period have often pursued analyses that presuppose practices and infrastructures that are contradicted by the actual historical scenarios laid bare in personal, punctual histories. Leveraging one such revelatory personal history, taken from the interaction between British and German translators as these are preserved in 1820s periodicals, the present paper demonstrates how periodicals may offer unique insight in day-to-day personal practices of translation which challenge extant accounts. A case will be presented which sees translators assert themselves and their creative options, thereby notably resisting burgeoning larger-scale narratives regarding the formalisation and marginalisation of the profession